Below is a Q&A session with Eddie Porrello, Director of Product at Amber Engine, a software company whose PIM software gets sellers and brands to online marketplaces in weeks instead of months.
Product listings are built from the ground up with product data. From bullet-point benefits to clever product titles and SEO-optimized descriptions, product data is how you communicate everything about your products.
Product data also includes user guides and other specifications documents like the PDFs to install or set up a product. It includes the keywords that get users looking at your products, too. Product data includes the ads for your products, plus product images, the 3D renderings, and even the augmented-reality experience that you provide users to see your product in its intended environment.
Even the social media content that features your product is considered product data.
It’s no wonder that product data is considered an asset, because it’s how you communicate everything about your products. It’s rarely treated as an asset, however.
Amber Engine explains what opportunities are anchored in product data in this digital-first economy.
First, who’s Amber Engine?
When any brand talks about product data in eCommerce, it’s unsurprising that they don’t immediately think of every kind of product data. The volume of product-related data we have today is unprecedented.
A brand might have product images stored on Google Drive and spreadsheets of product descriptions and bullet points in Excel. Maybe there are only a few people who ever update the Excel document because the owners don’t trust anyone to “do it right.” But really, even “doing it right” across thousands of SKUs will leave human errors across the catalog.
Add to that the multichannel norm of digital commerce today as brands sell on their own sites, Amazon, Etsy, social media, and elsewhere. Product data management has become a disaster.
That’s why the Amber Engine exists. Amber Engine is passionate about digital commerce and has engineered software solutions to make product data management easier, so brands can use this asset to its full potential.
So why e-commerce, and why now?
As long as there’s been retail, there’s been product data. The mail-in catalogs of yesteryear had it in the form of drawings of the products, descriptions, dimensions, and more. From the first time a seed catalog was printed in the 17th century up until today, product data has told consumers what they need to know before buying a product.
Until recently, every bit of that product data was managed manually. Handwritten ledgers were the norm until computer-based spreadsheets were introduced. This allowed for cleaner record-keeping and quicker updates, but with the introduction of multichannel commerce, another factor was thrown in that led to inconsistencies across channels.
The time is now to start selling online if a brand hasn’t already. The growth of e-commerce reached ten times what it normally saw during the first 10 months of the pandemic. Any brand that isn’t selling online will get left behind.
How do new consumer expectations impact product data?
Buyers need audio-visual-rich product data to convince them to buy today. This new requirement was driven by two factors:
- More products not sold online before can now be virtually “tried on” or inserted into their intended environment using augmented reality. New technologies give consumers more confidence to make online purchases.
- Because brands are rolling out more audiovisual content every day, users who have that experience with one brand walk away expecting it from everyone else.
The whole market has moved fast in the direction of what’s called “enriched product data,” or the videos, photos, and product-related “shoppable” content that the most cutting-edge brands use.
Because consumers are expecting this kind of product data more, it’s those same consumer expectations that require brands to include every kind of product data possible in each listing to get someone to hit “buy.”
What’s a “next-gen PIM?”
We break product information management (PIM) software into three classes:
- Legacy PIMs
- Modern PIMs
- Next-gen PIMs
Legacy software refers to the PIMs that weren’t designed for eCommerce. They usually aren’t in the cloud, and they aren’t designed for the file and data types included in product data today. They were designed before digital commerce was in full swing.
Modern PIMs are in the cloud. They were designed specifically to help brands manage the same product data tweaked for unique selling channels.
Next-gen PIMs were designed not only to aggregate every type of digital product data (including photos and videos), they were also designed to edit and optimize product data right in the app. It’s cleaner and faster, it leverages built-in tools like “data quality scores” to quickly identify problems, and exporting in the format required by each selling channel is just a click away.
What can product data do for you as an asset?
Product data is what consumers interact with, and so it’s ultimately what drives conversions. It’s also what gets products “found” through SEO. Your product data sends a message about your brand, too.
Do you go out of your way to provide a cutting-edge buyer journey? Do you demonstrate transparency with an abundance of detail about your products?
Product data is what you use in ad content for the remarketing ads that follow interested users around before the decision to buy is finally made, too.
At the end of the day, product data drives:
- Clicks to your product listings
- SERP on Google, Amazon, etc.
- Conversion rates on product pages
- Time spent on product pages
- Branding
Once you think of product data as an asset, you can start thinking about properly taking care of it. Nourish it. Polish it. Treat it like a prized possession, and it will perform like one.
What are the biggest mistakes made with product data?
The single biggest mistake brands make with product data is allowing their catalogs of product data to grow inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete.
Inconsistent product data will lead to a deep lack of confidence in your brand. What you do say about your products won’t hold water.
Incorrect product data will lead to bad reviews and charge-backs.
Incomplete product data will lead to low conversion rates.
It’s never a brand’s intention to leave product data inconsistent, incorrect or incomplete. It’s just the result of thousands of SKUs managed in manual processes and spreadsheets. Removing manual work and human error is a matter of migrating product data into a next-gen PIM.
How should brands prepare for the future of e-commerce?
Digital commerce will continue changing. The brands ready to take change need the systems in place today to adjust course whenever they need to.
For example, brands using a next-gen PIM can make simple and even automated updates to product data. If Amazon changes its data requirements, or if your brand is running a special on a certain line, or if you’re launching to a totally new eCommerce channel, a next-gen PIM has features like “if, then” logic to make changes consistently across your catalog.
Next, all you have to do is export the product data you need to a file pre-formatted for the channel you’re loading the data to.
Will PIMs get smarter?
PIMs will continue to get smarter as the next-gen PIM integrates more artificial intelligence into platforms.
Amber AI at Amber Engine, for example, uses data from the top 100 products in a product category to give brands specific insights on where product data can be optimized for proven sales.
This AI-powered software even has a click-to-deploy feature, making roll-out of each optimization as simple as one click.
What’s the first step?
Brands ready to move to the next generation of digital commerce can use the ROI calculator on the Amber Engine website to time it right. Whether you’re on e-commerce channels already or just starting to pull product data together, the calculator will help.
You can also sign up for the Amber AI trial, still in beta. Your testing and feedback will help Amber Engine polish and launch the state-of-the-art tool for smarter and easier product data optimizations.
About Amber Engine
Amber Engine is a company passionate about digital commerce technology. The next-gen product information management (PIM) software organizes all your product-related data in one place and simplifies advanced optimizations to sell more on Amazon and other online marketplaces. Amber AI is the AI-powered solution to optimize product data on Amazon, based on the best practices of your top-performing competitors.
Related Categories